By Ricky Smith

Sooner or later, it happens to almost every parent in our church. Your son or daughter comes home from school, or from a conversation with a friend, and says some version of the same thing: “My teacher said the universe is billions of years old. Is the Bible wrong?”

If you’ve had that moment, you know the flash of panic that comes with it. It can feel like your whole faith is suddenly on trial at the kitchen table, and you have about ten seconds to defend it or lose your kid to doubt forever.

Take a breath. That’s not actually what’s happening.

This past Sunday, as part of our ongoing walk through Genesis 1, we sat with a question a lot of us carry quietly: how old is the earth, really, and does the Bible actually answer that? We looked closely at the text itself, especially the strange detail in Genesis 1:14-19, where evening and morning happen three separate times before the sun is even created on day four. 

Every serious view of this passage, whichever way it lands, has to reckon honestly with that detail. We also looked at Exodus 20:8-11, where God ties our own workweek directly to His creation week, which is likely the single strongest piece of evidence for reading the days as ordinary, literal days.

Faithful, Bible-believing, inerrancy-holding Christians read this differently, and that disagreement doesn’t belong in the same category as whether Jesus rose from the dead, or whether Adam was a real man whose real disobedience brought real sin into a good world. Those things aren’t up for negotiation. The number of years in Genesis 1 is a matter where we can hold a real conviction and still extend real charity.

Here’s what we don’t want you to miss. Genesis 1 was never mainly trying to answer a modern science question. It was answering a much bigger one for its first readers: whose world is this, and can He be trusted? The sun and moon that the ancient world bowed down to and feared, Genesis calls “lights,” ordinary objects hung in the sky by a God who needs no help holding anything together.

So this week, if your kid brings home that question, you don’t have to panic, and you don’t have to have a perfect answer to every objection. You can say, “that’s a great question, here’s what I believe and why, and here’s what matters even more than the number.” That’s confidence without combat. And underneath the whole debate is an invitation that matters more than winning any argument: rest, in the God who made it all, and who made you.